Your canned tomato soup has a nutrition label but your fresh tomato doesn’t. Why is that?
In 1973, the FDA created a nutrition label framework that in 1990 became mandatory for most packaged goods, but not produce. Knowledge of nutrient content was still incomplete for whole foods, and methods of chemical analysis weren’t accurate enough yet. Packaged foods were also much easier to test at scale; produce wasn’t—technically or economically. Using our can of soup as an example, every can of soup is virtually identical when it slides off the production line: same recipe, same ingredients mixed together to homogenize, same ratios, and manufactured in the same factory as all the other cans of soup. A fresh tomato isn’t like a can of soup. Every farm’s fresh tomato will be grown in different conditions, in different soil, and picked at different times. The FDA had a measurement problem, so they tabled produce nutrition labeling for another time. Another time never came.
Farming this season, I can see how testing all produce in grocery stores would be difficult. I’ve seen soil nutrient variations in rows just a few feet away from each other. Different rows growing different crops have different weeds that in different ways, interact with both the soil and the plants growing in them. Some plants of the same species get more pest pressure than others, impacting how they grow and the fruit they produce. How and when you harvest matters a lot too. After 24 hours, spinach for example starts rapidly losing vitamin C at room temperature.. As I pick spinach on an 80 degree day, I watch it wilt in minutes in the sun, signaling it’s starting to degrade. A tomato ripened on the vine will have a different nutrient profile than one picked unripe and then ripened with ethylene gas. But to start, we don’t need to test everything. We can begin with a few crops from each farm and build our knowledge base from there.
The person buying produce at the grocery store today has no way of knowing when their food was picked, how long it sat in a truck, or the soil it came from, which will all impact the nutrients in it. You might have seen some packaged refrigerated produce at grocery stores that have nutrition labels. But those labels don’t tell us anything about what’s in that piece of food. They’re giving us only USDA averages, not information on that specific head of broccoli. It’s an average across all growing conditions, soil types, and farming practices. But we know all food isn’t grown equal.
The reason behind why we're stuck with averages is structural. Packaged food labeling requirements created an economic reason to build testing infrastructure at scale. Produce never had that requirement, so the infrastructure was never built. We can take averages at the farm level to start, but an average across all farms isn’t telling us much about the food we’re about to take home to cook. The philosophical foundation behind American food regulation over the past 50 years has been to give people information and let them decide what to buy. The idea is that better informed people make better choices, better choices create market pressure, and market pressure makes companies improve their products. For that idea to work, the information needs to give consumers the full picture and cover all food.
There was more happening in the 70s and 80s that matters here. The broader US economy in the 70s was dealing with inflation, unemployment, and repeated recessions, but in the early and mid 70s, farmers were doing great. High commodity prices, high production, and new export markets brought record income for American farmers. At the same time, Nixon’s administration shifted the incentive structures created in the New Deal under FDR. Nixon’s new policies encouraged farmers to “get big or get out,” making commodity crops the only economically rational choice to grow.
Across the rest of the economy, prices were high, American manufacturing was losing ground to Japan and Germany, and the stock market had barely moved in a decade. While shareholders became more frustrated watching their investments stagnate, compensation for corporate executives started changing. Before the 80s, executives were paid primarily by salary and bonuses not tied to the stock price. In the 80s their compensation structure was actively changing to be mostly stock, so that their personal wealth was tied to the success of the company, which is also the success of the shareholders. By the 90s, this was the main way executives got compensated. It still is today.
With corporate executives shifting their focus from product quality, employee welfare, and shareholder value to shareholder value alone, the entire economic system started optimizing for stock price above all. It wasn’t the only force pushing in that direction, but it was a significant one. Stock price became the main metric companies were evaluated against. Within the food system, this meant increase yield and lower costs. Nutrient density, soil health, and ecological consequences don’t show up in the stock price, so they’ve been quietly degrading over the past 40 years without a majority of Americans noticing.
Some Americans did notice a difference in taste. Ethel, the farmer I work alongside, remembered that once supermarkets became dominant in New York City, everyone in her neighborhood kept growing their own tomatoes because the grocery store options had no taste. That was one community’s workaround for a problem nobody had numbers for yet. The data backs it up. Research tracking 43 crops from 1950 to 1999 found a measurable decline in protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin C. A comprehensive review published in 2024 named nutrition decline as the biggest challenge for our future generations’ health. No one at the time these decisions on the food system were made was thinking about whether a tomato grown for maximum yield had fewer nutrients than one grown for quality because the data didn’t exist yet. There was no mechanism for anyone to notice.
The FDA actually did come back to nutrient labels on fresh produce in 1975, but then in 1983 officially killed it saying that the increased cost would offset any benefits consumers might receive. In 2024 they proposed new labeling requirements for packaged foods, but the produce exemption from 1973 remains untouched. The system optimized away from nutrition, and the regulatory tool that could have shown Americans the nutrients in their food were declining was never updated. The measurement problem still exists. The technology got cheaper, but it’s still not feasible for most farmers. Comprehensive nutrient tests run hundreds of dollars per sample. The infeasibility argument that made sense in 1973 has just been quietly inherited by every administration since.
For the past fifty years, few people knew the nutrients in our food were declining because nobody was required to measure it. I’m measuring it on a small plot in the Hudson Valley. Follow along at bit.ly/farmprotocols.
FDA nutrition labeling regulations and produce exemption (1973) — NCBI Bookshelf, National Academies Press
FDA formal withdrawal of produce labeling proposal (1983) — FDA Federal Register
FDA proposed front of package labeling (2024) — FDA.gov
1970s agricultural policy — farmdoc daily, University of Illinois
CEO compensation shift to stock options — Economic Policy Institute